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Managing Email Campaigns: A Guide for Agencies and Brands

What’s inside?

If you work in an agency or manage multiple brands, you not only must understand each business and their market, you also must cater to their needs. This whitepaper illustrates today’s smartest techniques and tools for producing noticeable results and exceeding client expectations. We guide you through the most common challenges and the solutions for dealing with them.

Introduction

If you work in an agency or deal with multiple products and brands, you may face obstacles other companies don’t recognize or experience. You must not only understand each business and their market; you must also cater to their needs. That means adjusting the content, design, copy, frequency and timing to fit the preferences of the target markets.

That’s a lot of work. But running complex email marketing campaigns doesn’t have to be a problem. We prepared this guide to show you the common obstacles agencies struggle with and modern ways to deal with them using the right tools.

Customer Profiling and List Segmentation

Challenge

Most brands target their offers to many different audiences at the same time. Even if your communication is about just one product, it’s likely that you’re not talking to a homogenous audience.

From a distance, it may be difficult to notice that your subscribers are all different. Can you tell which ones are the best and most loyal buyers? Can you identify the bargain hunters who only respond to coupons and seem uninterested in what you do?

Knowing who you’re dealing with can be a powerful weapon in your marketing arsenal. When you divide your audience into homogenous groups, you can choose the best approaches to communicating with each group. And you can know where to devote additional resources to deliver the perfect campaign. So how can you figure out who your subscribers and customers are?

Solution

To keep track of everything about your customers, choose an email marketing platform that integrates with your CRM system. Your goal is to create an extensive database about who your audience is and what they do. This may include:

What products your customers buy

Which products interest them

Which newsletters they open

Which o offers they click

Which subscribers haven’t bought any of your products

Figure out what information is useful and start tracking it. Then integrate the data with your email marketing platform and store additional information in custom fields. You’ll be able to segment your target audience quickly and run targeted email marketing campaigns.

Scenario

Imagine you have an online clothing store with a wide variety of products and brands. Knowing your audience and what they like can set you apart from competing vendors in your market.

You could integrate your CRM and shopping cart with your email marketing platform. Audience information stored in custom fields can be the foundation of targeted campaigns.

Now create the following segments:

Subscribers who have never purchased any of your products

Subscribers who haven’t opened any emails from you in the past three months

Customers who have purchased premium products

Customers who only purchase discounted products

Customers who have abandoned their shopping cart

These are just a few ideas. Each requires a different approach for effective campaigns that generate interest, reactivate the audience, convince them to purchase the abandoned product, or add an accessory for a product they already own.

Save these segments, design your templates, and send them to your audience. You’ll soon see that the targeted approach is much more efficient and generates better results than the old spray-and-pray approach.

If you want to find out more effective ways to use segmentation, check out this guide and blog article.

Delivering Unique, Relevant Content

Challenge

You’ve accepted the importance of segmentation, and you want to run effective email marketing campaigns with relevant, interesting offers. But do you have time to create 20 new newsletter designs, test them, and send them to your audience? Maybe in the short-term. But in the long run, it may be overwhelming. The challenge isn’t to come with different content for multiple messages. It’s the time it takes to run multiple campaigns at the same time. So what can you do?

Solution

The solution lies in dynamic content. You can personalize and customize your emails based on information you have gathered about your subscribers. It can be demographic or behavioral data, such as products they have purchased or offers they have added to their wish list, and much more.

Based on the data, come up with alternate scenarios and decide what type of information will appeal to each group. Prepare a few lines of code to serve the right content to the right people. Then send an email newsletter containing dynamic elements and see how your audience reacts.

Scenario

Imagine that you run email marketing campaigns for an online sporting goods store. Your customers are all sports fans — old and young, male and female. Despite the obvious characteristics, the main difference is the types of sports they’re crazy about. Some might like American football, others basketball, and some are into golf. With this knowledge, you can do a lot.

Let’s say the year is coming to an end and you want to get rid of the old stock. So you plan to offer a 20% discount on all products. You can say to your customers, “We’re taking 20% off everything.” Or you can target your audience based on the sport they follow. Show them the product categories they are truly interested in and familiar with. Unless your products mean something to them, they won’t know whether your prices are a bargain or the offer is valuable.

You can do much more. You can create email marketing campaigns using dynamic content to make the communication relevant. You can greet audience members by name, provide personalized discount codes, show products on their wish list, or items they abandoned in shopping carts.

Other examples of dynamic content include:

Welcome emails delivering useful information about the store or transaction

Autoresponder sent a few days after the purchase to suggest additional accessories to go with the product

Autoresponder sent a few weeks after the delivery asking for a review

If you’d like to find out more about what Dynamic Content can do for your business, check out this guide.

Managing Campaigns Across Multiple Time Zones

Challenge

As if dealing with heterogeneous audiences weren’t challenging enough, marketers often need to run marketing campaigns across different locations and time zones. Time-sensitive email marketing campaigns are difficult and time-consuming.

It’s not practical to manually send newsletters to each subscriber across the globe to suit their time preference. You’d never get to leave your office. So how can you improve your communication and run effective, efficient campaigns?

Solution

Look into tools that allow you to plan your communication ahead of time and automate the process where possible.

Set individual messages and sequences to be automatically deployed at specific time (e.g. welcome messages, reengagement campaigns, or special events)

Set autoresponders to be deployed after the subscriber performs a desired action (e.g. opens an email, clicks a specific link, or buys a product)

Use the subscriber data you can collect. For timely, relevant campaigns, take into account subscriber locations, behavioral data and preferences.

Scenario

OK, you’re running email marketing campaigns for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. You have customers all around the world and have run successful campaigns in several languages. The only problem is that you’re doing it manually, and you’d like to expand your business and run campaigns more efficiently

It’s essential to deliver the right content, in the right language and at the right time, so you may want to automate the process. Try this approach:

Prepare a welcome message using dynamic content to deliver the right information to each new subscriber. Include the subscriber’s login details and the helpline number or a video tutorial.

Set up a sequence of automatic emails (again using dynamic content) to explain the ins and outs of your service. This will guide your new subscribers and engage them so that they keep coming back.

Create a survey to be sent by autoresponder to new users a few days after they subscribe. This helps you keep track of whether audience expectations are in line with what you offer.

Implement a survey to send to users that don’t convert from a free trial to a paid account or stop logging into the platform.

Set up autoresponders that go out after subscribers open selected messages (e.g. about beta tests of a new feature) or click a specific offer. Send relevant content based on their behavior.

Schedule promotional newsletters by user time zones or previous email opens to strike when the iron is hot.

This is a good start for an effective communicational campaign. Sync it with your other communication channels so they reinforce each other. Now spend the time you saved on creating effective campaigns with timely, relevant content. The target audience will appreciate that!

Team Collaboration

Challenge

If you run email marketing campaigns for various products and brands, you may have a challenge not related to content and timing. You may not be working on your own.

Your team may be working jointly to deliver the campaign. Group work facilitates the exchange of ideas between team members that can lead to creative solutions that make the brand shine.

There is also a dark side. It’s not easy to streamline the processes, monitor the quality of work, and optimize campaign results. Many struggle to get things done and end up worse off than if they had worked alone.

So how can you manage team work on email marketing campaigns more efficiently?

Solution

Ideally, you should assign di erent tasks to di erent people. Your colleagues should have access to campaign elements they handle and nothing else. This way they can’t press the wrong button, send the wrong message, or delete your contact list. And it should be easy to send work to the manager or a moderator for quick feedback before the campaign is launched.

Look for a solution that lets you assign roles to users and give them access to different tools: graphic designer, copywriter, web developer, moderator — these are just few positions you might find on a marketing team. They should be able to work together and be on the same page at every stage of the project.

Scenario

Let’s imagine that you run email marketing campaigns for a university. Although there is a chancellor for the institution, each department has its own employees and ideas for promotional campaigns to recruit students and attract sponsors. Resources and employees may be shared across departments. The graphic designer or web developer could be designing templates for each department. Likewise, the director of the school could be the moderator, approving the final version of the messages the team puts together.

Team management solutions enable you to streamline those processes. You can assign different roles and access levels to your employees. They will be able to view their work, make adjustments, and forward the work to another colleague to take the project from there. Once the email design is ready, the moderator decides whether anything needs adjusting, or the team can choose the target audience and click the send button.

What’s Next?

As you can see, establishing effective global email marketing communication might seem challenging but it’s more than doable. All you need is the right tools that will help you streamline your marketing processes.

If you’re working in agency or managing multiple brands you’ll want to consider elements such as:

List segmentation and customer profiling.

Always delivering the most relevant content, regardless of the list size.

Sending the right message at the right time, even if it’s the middle of the night in the place where you’re located.

Collaborating with a team to exchange ideas and allocate tasks based on individual talents.

For the purpose of forming better relationships with subscribers and being able to run ever-more-so effective email marketing campaigns, you will now know how you can achieve all this.